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War is a poor choice

The Lowell Sun

Updated:
03/31/2013 06:36:24 AM EDT

By Michael Goldman

History has proven, time and again, that despite whatever the propaganda used to justify the initial entrance into a military conflict, in the end there are actually only two types of wars that get fought.

Those wars are ones of "necessity" and ones of "choice."

Our decision 10 years ago to cobble together a so-called "coalition" in order to attack Iraq, a country that had neither any plans nor any capacity to make war on us, makes the Iraq conflict our nation's third true "war of choice," following the Mexican-American War of 1846 and the 1898 Spanish American War.

Unlike those other two wars, however, which at least had some potential to expand the American land empire, the Iraq war was one of only hubris and brazen foolishness.

Earlier this year, I asked the two classes of college students I'm teaching this semester to answer what they believed had been the longest military conflict in U.S. history.

Despite the entire war having taken place during their lifetimes, none responded Iraq.

Can you imagine college students in 1945, 1953 or 1973 not knowing if World War II, Korea or Vietnam had been our longest war?

This past week, much has been much written about whether the lives lost and billions of dollars spent in that far away place were worth the blood, treasure, international credibility and national prestige it has cost us as a nation.

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Planned and executed by men who themselves aggressively had avoided active service during the Vietnam conflict 35 years earlier, the rationale for the Iraq invasion was built on tainted intelligence and poor planning.

Ten years later, we are aware that a full seven months before the attack on 9/11 by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida on the World Trade Center, the removal of bin Laden's mortal political enemy Saddam Hussein was the top item of President Bush's inaugural national security meeting "to do" list and not the capture or elimination of bin Laden.

As former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill wrote in his 2005 memoir quoting President George W. Bush at that January 2001 meeting, "Go find me a way to do this."

Cobbling together the ludicrous, the bizarre and the preposterous, the Bush team weakly knit a web of false facts that ultimately convinced the Congress, the press and a majority of the American public that Saddam needed to be removed from power.

These false facts alleged: Enemies Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were, in fact, allies; Iraq was somehow connected to the WTC bombing; Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to be used as nuclear centrifuges; Iraq had secret piles of WMDs; Iraq had attempted to purchase "yellow cake" from Niger to produce nukes; and Iraqis were harboring terrorists.

Deliberately repudiating the lessons learned by Secretary of State Colin Powell, the one member of their team who actually had put himself in harms way during the Vietnam War, "chicken hawks" George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others ignored the Powell Doctrine, which states no nation should ever enter into a limited military conflict without detailed plans on how it was also going to also successfully extricate itself from that conflict.

Bush is long gone, as is Cheney and the others, yet we continue to pay the price for that failed planning.

Families in more than 4,000 homes will live the rest of their lives without family members who bravely died on that foreign soil. Tens of thousands more of our bravest will spend a lifetime without limbs or suffer through nightmares of an enemy they never battled in the field but who instead left bombs planted where children played, women shopped and old men prayed.

The truth is it should always have been the job of Iraqis themselves, and not Americans, to rid their country of Saddam Hussein.

Sadly, like in the dying days of Vietnam, the only tragic question that remains unanswered is whose son or daughter will be the final American to die for the terrible mistake we made a decade ago to engage in this unnecessary, and ultimately unwinnable war of choice.

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